Brahms, Reinecke, Jenner | Brahms & Friends Vol. VI

 

Given the variety of musical styles and aesthetics discernable at any given moment in music history, it is possible to describe the music of a given era as belonging to one of three basic archetypes. The first is built on the assimilation of earlier modes of musical speech, without particular emphasis on bringing those older ways and means forward. Composers who fits into this category are the inheritors and preservers of received traditions. The second, although also built on the legacy of the past, seeks to redefine or transform it, almost always in highly personal, easily recognizable ways, and may even attempt to break with tradition altogether. Received tradtions in this model are starting points, not ends to be served. The third type falls somewhere between the first two and may have primary elements belonging to one or the other but for a specific difference. Composers of this category fall heavily under the influence of a single composer and seek to extend that influence, deemphasizing modification of adaptation of the source idioms...

 

Although not generally thought of as an innovator, Brahms clearly belongs to the second archetype in that he established his own distinctly recognizable musical speech built on the legacy of the past, but was not limited by it...

 

Gustav Uwe Jenner, who was Brahms’ only composition student of record and whose most important contribution was perhaps his two volume recollection of his master, «Brahms als Mensch, Lehrer und Künstler» (Brahms as Man, Teacher and Artist, Marburg 1905) produced a body of excellently crafted work which as often as not reflects the Brahmsian manner and substance. Jenner represents the third archetype, the composer largely indebted to specific, essentially untransformed influences...

 

Carl Reinecke, whose fecundity is reminiscent of his direct contemporary Joachim Raff, unlike Brahms, nurtured a great number of pupils, each of whom enjoyed an important and extremely varied carreer in his own right: Edvard Grieg, Leos Janacek, Isaac Albeniz and Max Bruch to name only the most notable. Reinecke produced a voluminous and varied body of music largely devoid of the advanced elements that characterized much of the literature of the final quarter of the 19th century. He rightly belongs to the first archetype.

 

Dr Avrohom Leichtling